As we await the NCAA basketball tournament brackets and prepare to make our picks for the Final Four, we realize that over the past year we have been to or been in contact with most of the 65 schools likely to be in the tourney. But it wasn't the great hoops teams that led us to their campuses. Rather, it was their students' inspiring commitment to ending the 21st century's first genocide.
While tremendous credit and acclaim will accrue to each of the schools for making the tourney, we ought to pause for just a second and recognize another kind of March Madness that is sweeping college campuses throughout the United States, with little media attention: a fledgling anti-genocide movement, dedicated to ending the atrocities being committed against the people of Darfur in western Sudan.

Movement growing

Unlike the fervor for their schools' basketball teams, driven by pep rallies and a media frenzy, this March Madness runs on the fumes of principle (it is our responsibility to stand up against genocide whenever it occurs) and conscience (we are our brothers' and sisters' keepers). Unlike the thousands of die-hard fans who are preparing to follow their teams across the country, most of these anti-genocide students will never visit the place they are defending. At the same time as the wins have mounted and fans have leapt on bandwagons going into the tournament, the anti-genocide activists' numbers have also been expanding. Inspired by the desperate situation in Sudan and the lack of action by governments around the world, they keep joining the movement. There are more than 1,000 STAND chapters on college and high school campuses dedicated to standing up against genocide in Darfur. Their members keep writing letters. They keep badgering their elected officials. They keep calling the White House.

In Palo Alto, Calif., Stanford students anticipate a trip to the Final Four while many of the same students prepare a massive protest of the Beijing Olympics' torch arrival in San Francisco. As the Drake Bulldogs were clinching a tournament berth, members of the campus STAND chapter were hounding presidential candidates to make Darfur a priority as they campaigned throughout Iowa.

Activists gather at Chapel Hill

The talented University of North Carolina Tar Heels might be all alone at the top of the national rankings, but they share the local limelight with classmates who recently hosted in their dorm rooms hundreds of Darfur activists from Southern states who are turning up the heat on their members of Congress.

Just before the University of San Diego blasted into the tourney with a dramatic conference title, a committed group of students organized a "die-in" to commemorate those who have lost their lives in Darfur.

This burgeoning spirit of selflessness and awareness among students all over the U.S., manifested in concern for people half a world away, is starting to have an impact. In the last year, the anti-genocide movement, driven as most social movements are by student activism, has succeeded in influencing:

• President Bush to name a senior peace envoy for Sudan.

• The U.N. Security Council to unanimously authorize for Darfur the largest U.N. protection force ever.

• The ICC to begin indicting Sudanese officials for crimes against humanity.

• 60 universities and 22 states to divest their endowment and pension funds of stocks of companies doing business with the Sudanese regime.

• Fidelity and Berkshire Hathaway to sell their Chinese oil company stock.

• Stephen Spielberg to quit as creative director for the Beijing Olympics.

• The Chinese government to start pressuring its commercial ally in Khartoum to stop killing its own people.

Give them a reason to cheer

That is -- in moral terms -- the equivalent of a Final Four appearance. With a stronger response from President Bush, President Hu of China and other world leaders, the genocide could end and all these university students would really have something to cheer about.

Now that's a March Madness worth remembering.